Vulture magic

I think we've got turkey vultures roosting in the barn. We had 30mph winds coming out of the northwest all day, with gusts up to 50, and I watched a gang coming in from the southeast, moving upwind without so much as a flap of the wings. They were bobbin' and weavin' but not flappin'. Imagine that; flying into the wind without flapping your wings!

Nature is amazing!

Later on I watched a few of them coming in with the wind. The only time they flap is when they need to gain altitude. Rest of the time, they're the most efficient glider mother nature ever invented.

The reason I think they're roosting in the barn is because, like everything else around Falling Downs, the barn is falling down. We lost a couple of barn boards in the last wind storm, high up near where the vultures used to sun themselves. 

There must be some kind of government grant I can get for running a turkey vulture conservancy.

Sound and light

It's amazing how much the weather impacts what you see and hear when you're out and about, and I mean out and about outside the confines of a vehicle. 

Back in the day, when I still had a job and didn't have the option of walking the dog at noon, and when they still had regular flights to Toronto from Thunder Bay and the Soo, you'd hear this propeller airplane overhead every morning around 7:15. It was a regularly scheduled flight, so I'm sure it went by at about the same altitude every morning, but some days it sounded like it was 100 feet overhead, and other times you couldn't hear it at all. 

Same with the passenger jets. There's not a lot of them anymore either, but, depending on weather conditions, they can be either totally silent, or sound like a B-52 coming in low and slow.

Weather determines what you see as well as what you hear. I come out the Grey Road 1 from Owen Sound almost every day. When you're going by the Kemble look-out, you can see Christian Island, a good fifty miles distant, clear as day. Sometimes.

Other times, you can't see it at all. 

Much depends on weather.

Commander Joe and the masked harpies

The most unnerving thing about watching the State of the Union address was those two masked harpies looking over Biden's shoulders for an hour. And what's with the masked Ted Cruz in attendance? By the way, I wonder if Ted's done a 23 and Me test; he looks blacker than Kamala if you ask me. 

The most obvious take-away from the Trump presidency is that the president "governs" at the pleasure of the permanent ruling class. They no doubt appreciate the fact that Joe's tenure won't present them with the kind of challenges they faced under Trump, who had the erroneous idea that he was actually the nation's de facto leader! What a doofus!

Joe bookended his address with references to the single greatest threat facing America today; white supremacy. The Jan. 6 insurrection was the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War. That day, America stared into the abyss...

Fortunately, the forces of light were able to defeat Viking Helmet and the rest of the Trumpian forces of darkness, and here we are today, with the steady hand of Commander Joe spearheading America's rescue and renewal. America, says Joe, is leading the world again!

And we're just getting started! 70% of Americans have already got their dose of hope. Once that's 100%, the sky's the limit, so MAKE SURE YOU GET YOUR SHOT!

Otherwise, you're possibly a secret Trump supporter and will just hold us back as we win the 21st century. That's right; Joe gonna make America way greater than Trump ever dreamed possible!

We will own the EV market!

We will dominate new technologies!

Then America will find a cure for cancer! And all of that while we're simultaneously eliminating systemic racism and transphobia, the two other pandemics holding America back from peak exceptionalism...

I don't know about that. The fundamental problem facing US democracy is that it isn't one anymore. Nothing Joe said will change that fact. The permanent ruling class is OK with that.

Mysteries of the hoarding mind

Whenever I update my ride, instead of trading in the old one, I park it behind the barn. The logic goes something like this: whatever they offer you for a trade-in value, it's worth twice as much, if only you can correct a couple of easy-to-fix-yourself flaws.

I'm winnowing the fleet a little. After twelve years at Falling Downs, it's time to face the fact that those easy fixes you can do yourself aren't going to happen. The Sub, the Torment, and the Escape are going for scrap value. That will leave the F-150, the Ford 4000 diesel tractor, and the Allis-Chalmers back-hoe. In terms of scrap weight, that's the heavy end of my portfolio. Now that I'm retired, I'll hang on to them as a just-in-case emergency fund.

That's how the hoarding mind works. You invent the most convoluted rationalizations for hanging onto stuff!

There's a couple of guys on the next concession who make me look like a rank amateur in the hoarding game. Where I have a modest fleet, they have acres upon acres. I'd like to hear their rationalizations.

That's another safe harbour for the hoarder; comparing yourself to those whose affliction is more advanced. It's the old "it's all relative" gambit. 

The garage is where I really fell down. When we took ownership here, that garage was completely barren. It was going to be my shop. The first piece of shop equipment we moved into it was a workbench with a drill-press affixed to it, that my father brought up in the back of his truck. That was twelve years ago.

That workbench was the last piece of shop equipment that went into "my shop," as it was soon overwhelmed with... oh my God, I could write a Knausgardian epic on the contents of my garage. I started the de-hoarding last summer with a purge of BBQs and a portable generator.

That was easy though. This year I must make tough decisions. The Mustang and the Ninja are in there. They need next to nothing and they're almost in perfect shape.

No way can I possibly part with them...

The age of grievance

Whatever happened to getting over it?

We have raised a generation of infants who will allow their world to implode if someone calls them a bad word.

These infants have graduated from institutions of higher learning that have largely closed off traditional tenure-track career paths to their own graduates. Whereas the newly minted Doctor Phil was always considered a great success, today, he or she or choose your pronoun would be looking ahead to the life of a typical adjunct professor. 

That's the equivalent of working in a Fullfilment Center, but you just invested ten years of your life in a Ph.D... sucker!

Actually, I think they're generally getting better pay and benefits at the Amazon warehouses than what those sessionals make.

To say nothing of the student loans!

That makes for a very bitter professoriate. 

No wonder they're turning our youth against America!

 

Jeffrey Sachs calls bullsh!t on anti-China propaganda

Jeffrey Sachs is working overtime to get himself black-listed from mainstream media. Here's his back-and-forth with a BBC presenter last week.

The point he is making is that when the West is harping about human rights in other countries, it is, at the best of times, nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black.

That is an overly kind assessment. 

From the fire-bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, nobody spills more blood in this world than America and its vassals. It's not even close.

America has never been reluctant to use it's financial dominance to punish those who would resist the hegemon. America's policy of starving the most vulnerable in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Nicaragua, and Venezuela by the hundreds of thousands via illegal and immoral sanctions is presented every day as "standing up for human rights and the rules-based international order."

Good on Professor Sachs for calling out American hypocrisy and big media's endless toadying to US power.

Armenian genocide and Israeli apartheid; what's the world coming to?..

The fact that these two stories are prominent this week signals a major reshuffle in narrative management, which in turn reflects the diminishing influence of Sultan Erdogan in the first instance and King Bibi in the second.

I for one do not view these developments as ushering in a new era of human rights awareness in Western political circles. We're operating in the realm of PR here, not in the realm of actual "human rights." Turkey remains a NATO ally sitting on a geopolitically strategic piece of real estate. Don't hold your breath waiting for meaningful censure of the only Muslim NATO member.

That goes double for "the only democracy in the Middle East." If anything, the opprobrium will be aimed at Human Rights Watch, not Israel. Just last week 330 congressional reps from both parties renewed their vows of fealty to Israel.

The only possible consequence of this narrative turn that is of any interest is that it could lead to a Erdogan - Netanyahu rapprochement. 

Why not?

Why BIPOC is bullsh!t

I've always had issues with the label. "People of Colour" seems a mighty large basket. I spent a few lazy hours perusing grad class photos from elite Canadian schools the other day, like Osgoode Law, U of T Law, software engineering at Waterloo, and so on. Check it out for yourself. POCs are absolutely thriving in Canada, and are statistically over-represented in these elite institutions.

But guess where People Of Colour are under-represented. Check out this pie chart of Canada's prison population in 2019. POCs are about 20% of Canada's population, but only 13% of the prison population.

Let's see how the other denizens of the BIPOC combine are faring in prison stats. The "B"s make up just under 4% of the population, but over 7% of the prison population. Looks to me like the "B"s don't have all that much in common with the POCs.

But the real outliers are the "I"s, our Indigenous population. While the B's are over-represented in the prison system by almost 100%, the "I"s are over-represented by a factor of 500%! 

Sure, they're both over-represented, but what do these groups actually have in common? 

Why are First Nations allowing themselves to be branded by the contrived nomenclature of the misguided social justice entrepreneurs who want to convince themselves that everyone not white suffers equally under the yoke of systemic racism?

The First Nations are called that because they were here first. From their perspective, everyone else is an immigrant, and that includes the Bs and the POCs. They have a claim on the conscience of this nation that is on a completely different level than the rest of the BIPOC agglomeration. 

They should assert that claim more aggressively, and not allow themselves to be used as water carriers for non-Indigenous social justice entrepreneurs with a larger agenda.

 

Another Christian missionary reveals horrors of Chinese Communist Party

The Toronto Star has a story in the Insight section today; "Can't stay silent on oppression of Uyghurs."

We meet Andrea and Gary, NGO workers from small-town Manitoba, who spent ten years doing poverty alleviation in Xinjiang. "They are now speaking out about the horrors they witnessed..."

Among the horrors they witnessed were Muslim girls being forced to remove their head-coverings at a flag-raising ceremony. Oh, the beastliness of that depraved communist regime! Who can even imagine such a thing?

Almost reminds one of Quebec!

The most interesting thing about the story is that Joanna Chiu and Jeremy Nuttall completely gloss the fact that Andrea and Gary went to China as missionaries, now known as "holistic development workers" in do-gooder babble. When the Lord called them back to Manitoba to run the Mennonite Heritage Village, this bio appeared on the local news site.

This is not an oversight, but a deliberate strategy. Would our knowing that these whistle-blowers were Christian missionaries enhance or diminish the credibility of the story? I think the vast majority of readers would assume that such people are predisposed to show godless communism in the worst possible light.

As journalism, this is pretty slip-shod stuff.

As propagandists, Chiu and Nuttall made the right call.

Horseradish memories at Falling Downs

Somehow we got to talking about summer camp. That was after a fifteen minute speculation about why, and why now, the Biden-masters are officially recognizing the Armenian genocide as a Genocide. The geopolitical implications are mind-boggling, and since neither the Farm Manager or myself, after twelve months of you know what, have enough mind left to risk boggling, we went to summer camp instead.

The FM went to summer camp religiously. Not that it was a religious camp or anything. Her father was a prominent Jewish merchant in Owen Sound back in the day, and getting the kids out of his hair over the summer months meant lots of time at the YMCA run day camp out at Presquille. 

I, on the other hand, only got to go to summer camp once. My parents figured anytime you want some fresh air, go out and hoe some potatoes, so shelling out a few bucks for summer camp was never on the table. (Although the potatoes were.)

When I was about twelve or so, I won a week at summer camp because I had memorized the most Bible verses in my Sunday School class at the Guelph Bible Chapel. The camping experience was pretty cool. The camp was at the Conference Grounds right behind the church. I never suffered homesickness because I knew I could walk away and be home in under an hour.

They had a swimming pool, a tennis court, a go-cart track, and the camp counsellor in my cabin was a guy who was playing football at the University of Michigan; a veritable god in my little universe. But what really stands out in my recall of my only week at summer camp, was one particular meal.

I don't remember any other meal I had that week, and all the campers were herded into the dining pavilion three times a day, so the first time I had pizza was memorable indeed. It was a buffet-style set-up, and after loading up on a couple of pieces of today's feature, the mysterious "pizza," I added a few other items, including the creamy coleslaw.

It was '67 or '68, but I was new to pizza. I found it kinda hot. I shovelled a big scoop of that creamy coleslaw into my face to cool things down...

THAT'S NOT COLESLAW, THAT'S HORSERADISH!!!

But the FM had a horseradish story too. Aside from the fur business, her folks were big-time into the local theatre scene. Her mom's family had theatre connections right back to the shtettl days, and it was only natural for her to get involved in the new country. Quite often their plays would tour to little theatre competitions across Canada, with her mom as the director and her dad as the producer.

People today don't appreciate the role of theatre in the lives of the eastern Jews, but it was a really big deal at the time. Hollywood and the US entertainment industry were built by the folks who transplanted that culture to America, and that was a tight community. Lorne Michaels was returning Ruth Gorbet's phone calls long after he became a big deal with Saturday Night Live.

From time to time their troupe won awards, and celebratory dinners were in order. One of the Farm Manager's favorite memories of her father was the time they were seated at a gala dinner, and although, since the FM herself was a mere script assistant, they were seated fourteen seats apart, the secret Jewish telepathy kicked in whenever brisket and horseradish were on the table at the same time.

There's no way I can top that story. Secret Jewish telepathy wins again!

How does a 24 year old with zero business accomplishments make the front page of Report on Business?

With his feet on a boardroom table, no less!

Report on Business is the the biz section of Canada's newspaper of record, regardless of the pretensions of the PostMedia folks. As such, it has more than a little shlepp. 

Alfred Burgesson is featured on the front page of Report on Business because he is Black. There is no other reason. There is nothing in the story to indicate that Alfred has any entrepreneurial experience other than filling out grant applications. But because of his skin tone, the slaves to political correctitude at Thomson-Reuters make this a front pager at Report on Business.

Surely there must be actual Black businessmen and women Report on Business could foreground who have actual business experience.

Swordfights on Memory Lane

Here's another missive from my teaching days, since I'm meandering down Memory Lane anyways...

One of the rules the Board had for shop teachers was you couldn't allow students to make weapons. So when I got several project proposals to make swords, I was forced to make some teacherly decisions.

As in, "hey Billy, I can't approve a sword project, but why don't you call it a letter opener and we'll be good to go."

That worked out till that fateful day I was called away to a football game or something. When you're a new teacher they load you up with all kinds of coaching shit you don't have a clue about. I get back, and am mightily chagrined to be called to the office.

Apparently, the supply teacher had reported that my students were having swordfights with their letter openers.

The "pencil holder" gambit

Back in the day, in my early years as a high school shop teacher, I had taken a cursory glance at the official curriculum, and figured I could do better. 

I introduced a really simple three-stage "lesson plan" for the entire semester. The class was held in what used to be called a machine shop but was now officially known as a manufacturing lab.

Since "manufacturing" means making stuff, the students could make whatever they wanted, so long as they followed my three-stage protocol, at least according to my interpretation of the official curriculum documents.

Stage one; present me a project proposal. Draw me a picture. That's called a blueprint in the real world. Great opportunity to learn about scale and measurement.

Stage two; write up an order of operations. That requires the student to walk through the entire manufacturing process on paper. Obvious miscues are way cheaper to fix while they're still on paper.

Step three; get it done.

So pretty much the first project proposal I get looks a lot like a hash pipe to me.

"Hey Billy, this looks like a hash pipe to me...."

"Oh no sir, it's a pencil holder."

"Get outta here Billy! You're tryna' slip a hash pipe by me!"

Anyway, Billy showed me where the pencil went, and that was good enough for me. 

That class must have flooded the hash pipe market for years!

Chauvin Guilty! White Supremacy Vanquished!

It's a new day in America! Four hundred years of racial oppression are over! Systemic racism is no more!!!

On the other hand, the jubilation at getting one toxic cop off the streets is perhaps somewhat premature. What if there are others?

What if our winner-takes-all economic system, which creates mass poverty even more efficiently than it mints fresh billionaires, remains in place without meaningful reforms? Or, will this new day in America somehow rectify the injustices inherent in our society by equalizing the number of both rich and poor by race?

What if, after the euphoria recedes, after Reverend Al takes his private jet back to NYC, the millions living in hopeless urban squalor wake up and realize they're still living in the same hopeless squalor?

What then?

America braces for more peaceful protests

The plywood is going up on storefronts across America, as US media eagerly anticipate, some would say encourage, the inevitable mayhem that will ensue regardless of the verdict rendered in Minnesota. No wonder the price of lumber is at record highs!

Enraged mobs will demonstrate their commitment to social justice by looting and burning down their local shopping districts. LeBron will no doubt issue some distraught tweets in his capacity as public intellectual. The usual social entrepreneurs will use the opportunity to revive their fundraising. Al Sharpton will have so many media appearances he'll have to clone himself just to keep up.

Octogenarian Maxine Waters has the Dem nomination for '24 in the bag, if she wants it. The brilliant leadership she displayed at the weekend made Sleepy Joe look, well, kinda sleepy, don't you think? Waters isn't just older and wiser than Joe, but clearly there's still a fire in there somewhere, and the marbles seem to yet roll mostly in the right direction, at least compared to the President.

If there is one thing that we know for sure, it's that no matter how bad things get in the days ahead, regardless of loss of life or property damage, it will never occur to anyone in DC that the world is watching and wondering why America's overweening concern for human rights in Venezuela and China never translates into improving the lives of its own citizens.

I have but one positive development to report after 25 years in teaching

After years of building stuff, being an entrepreneur, going to rehab, going bankrupt, going to Outhouse College, I landed my first teaching gig in 1995. I retired last year. Not bad timing when you look at what's going on now!

In the course of those twenty-five years at the front of the classroom, or more often the middle or the back, I must have had a few thousand students. Many of them I find unforgettable. 

Overall, I'd give the education system in our province a D- for how they've managed over the last quarter century. For about the last ten years of my career, I was mostly teaching grade-school arithmetic, as in grades two to five, to kids in grades nine through twelve. That's because if you gave these kids actual high school curriculum, they'd all fail. Every one of them.

That would cause consternation at the Board level, where they like to keep their graduation stats nice and sparkly. As a result, a high school diploma means you can sort of do grade four math. The employers in our community noticed that long ago.

I could go on for almost forever about everything the educrats have fucked up, but let me fast-forward to the one thing I saw go right in the course of my career.  

I cannot speak for the system in general, but in the environment I worked in, in the classroom, and in the building as a whole, there was real progress made in creating a more tolerant and inclusive environment. I spent a few years as one of the teacher reps for the Gay Straight Alliance. Twenty-five years ago, kids like my nephew or my step-son risked getting beat up for being who they were. The first year of the GSA, they used to post a VP outside the door, just in case. 

Things have changed!

I remember a few years ago when the first wave of Syrian refugees were arriving, and we saw "Mohamed Mohamed" on our timetables for the following September. Anxious glances were exchanged in the staff room. 

Mohamed Mohamed? We'd seen nothing like it... how will this go in our rural community?

Six months later, "Mo-Mo" is one of the coolest kids in the school!

That's good stuff, but, looking back, what I love the most is how things changed for the First Nations students over the course of my twenty-five years. I'll say off the top that this change had way more to do with a cultural shift on the Indian side than anything the education system did.

In the early years of my career, you didn't see a lot of Indian kids in high school, and the ones you saw were most likely to be female. We've got a couple of First Nations in our catchment area, and historically we've done a poor job of making our system work for them. The male students especially had a difficult time coming to school. I spent time at the local Friendship Centre quizzing the people there on the reasons for that, and at the time, formal education was very much identified as being part of the "apple syndrome," you know; red on the outside and white on the inside.

Shift to the last few years of my career, and I'm standing in the hall chatting with colleagues between classes, and it's all "how is so-and-so doing in your class," and we come to the realization that a male Native student is at the very top of our respective classes!

Not only are they coming to school, they're blowing our minds. I had a steady stream of Ritchies and Johnsons over the last few years, right down to the last Ritchie who was practising his German-speaking skills with me on the very day my exploding retina ended my teaching career.

Who can even imagine such a thing? Not only is this young First Nations man scorching through high school at the top of his class, in addition to learning his traditional languages, he's also studying German and Russian!

That's what I feel best about when I look back at those twenty-five years.

Another one bites the dust

The sun is out and so am I, catching some vitamin D on the front stoop.  Very little traffic on the road today. People seem to be heeding Big Doug's latest lockdown. 

I hear something approaching from the west, in a bit of a hurry by the sound of it. It's an OPP cruiser. You don't see them much around here, and when you do, they're generally not in a hurry. Something's up.

Five minutes later, an OPP SUV. Not in quite as much a rush, but still driving like she wants to get somewhere.

Ten minutes after that, an ambulance. He's in no rush at all. He's driving the speed you go when you're keeping an eye out for a place to get a slice and a pop, and we don't have any of those out here.

Half an hour later, the little convoy comes back the other way. Nobody's in any hurry at all now.

It's a story that tells itself, don't it?

SWAT team at Lake Charles

How do I know? Because I called them in, that's how.

Yup, me and the Farm Manager were on our way over to de Jongs Farm Store, and right there at the corner in Lake Charles, hard by the Methodist church, there was these two gnarled-up old men. Didn't look like they'd be too long for this world, even under the best of circumstances, but get this; they were UNMASKED and NOT PROPERLY DISTANCED!

Can you imagine? A couple of geezers talking at close quarters, the spittle spraying in all directions... including quite possibly onto my passing car. Well, after Big Doug's presser yesterday, I wasn't taking any chances.

By the time we left de Jongs, you could already hear the sirens in the distance.

So a crew of drywall guys cavorted with a stripper?

 

This is what passes for a big story at CBC News. A subcontractor to a subcontractor at Mattamy Homes, one of Canada's biggest property developers, sought to reward their drywall crew for a job well done. I would provide you with a link, but apparently my link-providing privileges have been suspended. Best to go to CBC and see for yourself.

What got my dander up is not the stripper angle, but the assumption that everybody in the drywall trade is a card-carrying misogynist. I know for a fact that one of the tough chicks who came through my shop back in my shop teacher days is slinging drywall to this day, and she makes a good living and is held in high regard by her colleagues. 

CBC would have had a much better story if they'd asked someone like her what they thought about the strippers.

Save lives - rat out your neighbours

I was listening to Big Doug's very scary newser about our latest "we really mean it this time" lockdown.  A reporter asked if folks should call the police if they spot their neighbours flouting any pandemic rules. He was told that while we shouldn't inundate the police with nuisance calls, if it is a matter of saving lives, then of course that's what you are morally obliged to do.

And of course, every one of those science-based rules is a clear life-saver... which is why we're seeing record covid numbers after a year of social distancing and masking!

The disintegration of America continues apace

America was a pretty cool place back when I was able to dial it in via that GE tube radio, with a big crack in the yellow plastic housing.

That bedside radio brought a couple of Chicago rock and roll stations to my bedroom back in the middle sixties. WLS and WCFL. I can remember their respective jingles. That was an America I felt I knew and understood.

That was an America that had a legacy of racism, but was working hard to heal. People like Muhammad Ali and MLK inspired people on both sides of what was delicately termed, at least by those wanting to be delicate, as the "colour divide." Those seemed like hopeful days.

Alas, a half century later, things do not seem nearly as hopeful. There is no one on either side who can bridge that divide. Instead, we have a so-called movement, that has been entirely co-opted by corporate interests, being promoted everywhere in corporate media as the sole legitimate representative of everyone ever victimized by white supremacy, which of course translates into everybody who isn't white.

Bear in mind that this theology is being flogged by a billionaire class that is almost exclusively white.

There's a reason BLM has all that establishment support. As long as they can keep us at one another's throats, we'll never have a chance to gang up on our common enemy.

That prospect scares the shit out of them.

Bad Vlad threatens Ukie sovereignty again

The Globe and Mail's Chief Internet Correspondent offers up a scary headline on the front page today; "Ukrainian Border Troops Wait For Putin's Big Push." Yup, it's all about the Russian troop buildup you've been reading about for the last couple weeks. Here are a few salient background points missing from MacKinnon's narrative. Remember, this is happening as major NATO war games are about to begin, literally within sight of the Russian border.

- On 24.03.21 it was reported that Zelensky signed a strategy paper confirming that the retaking of Crimea, by force if necessary, remains a priority for the government of Ukraine.

- On 02.04.21 US President Biden called Zelensky to offer America's "unwavering support."

- On 06.04.21 NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg assured Zelensky of NATO's unconditional support.

Given the sordid history of US interference in the countries of the former Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine, the Russian leadership prudently sent a signal to the effect that any pending hanky-panky would be painfully counterproductive for the Ukrainian side, and who can blame them? Although you'd never know it from MacKinnon's article, by 09.04.21 Zelensky had got the message loud and clear. Here is a quote from General Ruslan Khomchak, the same guy quoted by MacKinnon, five days before the Globe story appeared, and a mere two weeks after Zelensky had triggered the "crisis;"

Liberation of Donbass by force will lead to mass deaths of  civilians and servicemen, and this is unacceptable for Kiev.

By the 9th, the Ukrainians had smelt the coffee, and were effectively standing down. Nevertheless, this did not prevent the G7 nations, including Canada, releasing a joint statement declaring their "unwavering support for Ukraine" on the 12th! 

America and her flunky states, and their captive media, salivate at the prospect of fighting the Russians... right down to the last Ukrainian.

Why I'm confused

I'm in the car yesterday, I've got the CBC on, and they've got a couple of what sounds like teenage airheads babbling about whatever can we do about vaccine hesitancy? There are people shying away from the AstraZeneca vaccines, and it's awful, because it's totally safe and their concerns are totally unfounded!

There follows a cringe-worthy (at least to my ear) exchange about how to talk to your obviously retarded vax-skeptical friends and relatives to show them the light without hurting their feelings too much.

I get home and open my laptop, and the first story at the top of the CBC News home page is about another country restricting the AstraZeneca jab because of those pesky blood clots.

That's why I'm confused. Up your game, CBC!

High camp runs afoul of political correctitude

If PC culture is allowed its rampage across the landscape unimpeded, there will soon be a time when this kind of joyful poke in the eye of the establishment will no longer be permitted.

Behind all the Yellow Peril hysteria, it's business as usual

Here's a fun story I happened upon because it was a rainy day and I had too much laptop time. Apparently freight rates on the big container carriers are at all time highs, because Walmart and Amazon are processing unprecedented volumes of made-in-China crap. 

Just exactly how does that work when America is supposedly in an existential war with China?

Scientific management in the age of artificial intelligence

For those of you who didn't reap the benefits of a Sociology of Labour 4th year seminar course on "scientific management," that's where the top industrialists back in the day got sold on the idea that having guys with stop-watches tracking every move a workee made in the course of their ten or twelve hour shift was devoted to productivity. That's the kind of thinking that eventually led to guys like me taking great pride in completing the New York Times crossword in the shithouse at General Electric. 

By then we had the kind of union protection that was non-existent when the first tentacles of Taylorism, aka scientific management, were creeping onto the shop floor. And, yes, spending an hour and a half in the shit-house doing the crossword was a brazen abuse of the influence unions got us.

But it was also an act of resistance. 

As Bob says, things have changed. Thanks to "right to work for less" laws and the overall anti-union climate that has prevailed since the Thatcher-Reagan era, "union" became a controversial word in America.

I watched the Bessemer union drive with some interest. The richest man in the world played a good game. He came in with a starting wage that looked good in the slave state of Alabama. Threw some decent bennies on the table too. There's union jobs in the USA that don't do nearly as good.

Bezos is scared shitless of actual worker empowerment. Check out this story about his machinations to keep unions out of Whole Foods.

Heat maps? WTF?

The social scientists and artificial intelligence nerds, the Frederick Taylors of our day, are working on algorithms that will fine tune just the right amount of ethnic diversity that will minimise the risk of a successful union drive.

How fucked up is that?

 

How to break the worry habit

This is hilarious. Near the bottom of a home page utterly dominated by scare-mongering drivel, the wise guys at Canada's national propaganda network saw fit to give you the finger with this gem; 3 steps to break the bad habit of worrying.

Oddly enough, stop looking at CBC isn't listed as one of the three steps.

If you avoided CBC and spent that part of your day walking the dog, you would have missed the latest headlines about COVIDCOVIDCOVID cases cases cases, not to mention that deadly new brain virus that broke out in New Brunswick, and let's not ever forget that if the pandemic don't get ya, climate change will, so you're fucked no matter what.

How to break the worry habit?

Shut off the CBC!

Archie Bunker gets woke

I called up Archie on the ouija board the other night. Here is a transcript of our chat.

Me: Is that you, Archie?

Archie: Ya ya, it's me. Good to see you again. Whadya want this time?

M: Well Arch, I figure you probably been watching things play out, and I wondered if you had any thoughts?

A: Ayeayeayeayeaye... yeah... what the fuck is wrong with youse people today? I see where my country, the United States of America, now flies the poofer flag at ever embassy around the world. America? Land of the free and home of the homos? You gotta be kidding me! And what's this gender fluid stuff? In my day you didn't talk about your gender fluids except maybe with your doctor.

M: What advice would you have for President Biden?

A: Oh, I think Joe's on the right track. We gotta finally get wise to the Rooskies. That Putin fella, well, if we don't fight him over there in Ukrainistan we'll be fighting him on Coney Island. And the fuckin' towelheads, when is somebody gonna get serious about them? I say nuke 'em now, while the nukin's good!

M: Any thoughts on the racial justice movement?

A: Ya, ya, Black Lives Matter and all that. I mean ya, of course Black lives matter. I mean, don't be stupid. Can you imagine a Patriots - Jets game without them? But then you got your NHL, and the Black lives don't matter that much over there, because they never had hockey in Africa. It was too hot. How you gonna make a ice rink in the jungle?

M: Thanks for your time, Arch. Stay cool!

A: Haha... get outta here, ya goofball!

The media's image makeover of crackhead frat-boy Hunter

The same media outlets who assure us that Sleepy Joe won the White House with by far the most votes in the history of US democracy are keen to show us that Hunter Biden is just a regular aw-shucks kinda guy.

Not sure how many regular guys amuse themselves with nude selfies once they're out of their teens, but what the hey, let's cut the dude some slack. It had to be tough, growing up in the shadow of a famous father.

Seeking solace in a five-star hotel suite with a crack-pipe and a couple of hookers is an eminently reasonable response to such egregious pressures. 

What Hunter reveals in his just-released best-seller is that the Bidens are a typical American family who face adversity with typical can-do American optimism. Hunter's triumph over his various addictions is a truly inspirational story!

Only in America!

Traditional spring grass fire a blazing success!

It was a sunny and quiet morning, and I thought it a good time to burn the old newspapers and flyers and cardboard that's been accumulating in the pantry. I got a little more than I bargained for.

Somehow my little fire got out of the fire pit and burned off a good half acre of old grass. I'd been tidying up some debris that fell off the old pine in the front yard, and when I checked on my garbage fire ten minutes later, well!

I rounded up a couple of buckets and kept the flames away from the barn, but other than that, it didn't have anywhere to go and eventually petered out. It had pretty much run its course save for a couple of smouldering fence-posts, when a young fellow who lives up the road stopped in and introduced himself. He's a member of the Intertownship Fire Department and wondered if I'd like him to radio for a crew. By that time I'm sitting in a lawn chair with a beer in my hand. I've heard the landowner gets a whopper of a bill when they're called out, so I declined the offer.

Now I've got "replace burnt fenceposts in corral" added to my to-do list. I've pencilled it in for summer '26.

Cold turkey for Easter

The internet service at Falling Downs went poof last Thursday afternoon. After an hour on the phone with the internet provider, we were told the problem was an equipment failure, and their contractor would get right on it after the long weekend.

So we enjoyed a nice quiet four day weekend of agonizing withdrawal symptoms; irritability, inability to focus, FOMO anxiety, and so forth. You really don't appreciate how hooked on technology you are until it's taken away. 

Doug Ford's band of experts-du-jour also chose the weekend to unleash the latest "lockdown." Seems that between the Variants of Concern and the mutations and the double mutations, this next wave is hitting hard. "The case numbers are horrific!" (although actual daily deaths have yet to show a next wave.)

So everybody has to stay home unless they have to go to Walmart or the liquor store or something. The minimum wage PSWs still work in multiple LTC sites because it's just too darned complicated to give them full-time hours and paid sick days, so they'll continue spreading the virus. Borders are closed, except for the thousands of "essential" truck-drivers crossing daily without any isolation whatsoever. 

Yup, we're really gonna wrestle the virus to the ground this time!